Ernst: Hurdles in getting local farms' food to schools

Saturday

Oct 12, 2013 at 9:21 PM

A national movement to change the way we source our food has started where reforms often do, in the public school system.

Eric Ernst

When we buy fruits and vegetables, whether from a restaurant or a grocery, we rarely think of their origins. At worst we buy our food processed, precooked and packaged, ready to heat and serve. At best, when we do select “fresh” fruit and produce, they may have come from thousands of miles away, often from other countries and often picked before they're ripe.

A national movement to change that culture has started where reforms often do, in the public school system.

Called Farm to School, the initiative puts fresh produce, grown locally, on school lunch plates. Curriculum then complements the practice by emphasizing to students the nutritional value of fruits and veggies. And, school gardens give students the chance to see how produce grows.

Of the three elements, the latter two are fairly easy to accomplish. The first, however, is much more complicated because it runs into an agricultural distribution system built on long-term contracts, established markets and relationships that have evolved over decades.

Despite pockets of success, Florida's Farm to School program was floundering until 2012, when the Department of Education relinquished control of it to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services under Adam Putnam. Since then, progress has at least been visible, although still slow.

One school district where the program seems to be gaining momentum is Sarasota, where the food director, Beverly Girard, has been meeting one-on-one with farmers to build connections.

“Why in the world would we purchase something from California when it's grown right here in Manatee County?” she asks. Girard, who grew up on a farm in rural Indiana, says those types of questions used to launch conversations around her family's dinner table.

They're resonating now as she tries to develop supply and distribution solutions.

“There's no model to follow. It's been truly a learning process — what works, what we can get. I still marvel at our different growing seasons here,” she says.

Girard has developed contacts with 22 farmers, most of them within 100 miles. They supply the district with some of the milk, tomatoes, potatoes, citrus, greens, peppers, squash, blueberries, strawberries, watermelon, cucumbers and grapefruit for 32,000 lunches served daily. Last year, the district spent $200,000 on local produce. This year, Girard expects to spend $250,000.

Even so, one might call the expenditure small potatoes in a $7.2 million annual food budget.

It could be larger, except for the distribution hurdle. “I don't have the trucks to deliver the food to each school,” Girard says. Neither do the farmers. Nor do farmers or the district have processing plants or storage facilities that some produce demands.

That brings middlemen such as brokers, trucking firms and processing companies into the equation.

And this is where the Department of Agriculture's involvement may pay off. To try to work out the logistics, the department contracted with the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, which hired five coordinators to work at the regional level.

Zach Glorioso, based in Sarasota at the Cooperative Extension Office, oversees the south-central district, covering 11 counties from Pasco to Collier. He acknowledges the immensity of his challenge, but sees a future in which, for instance, cooperatives might develop to handle storage and processing and districts might coordinate their purchases.

As part of National School Lunch Week, Glorioso and Girard have organized a program at 2 p.m. Friday at Englewood Elementary School to highlight two farms that supply products to Sarasota County students. Representatives from M & B Dairy in Lacanto and Jones Potato Farm in Parrish will talk to the children about how they produce their goods.

Girard says she selected the Englewood school because of its theme, “A good place to grow.”

The potato farm is a good example of both the potential and the shortcomings of Farm to School.

Last year, Alan and Leslie Jones sold the school district 5,250 pounds of potatoes from their 2,400 acres. It was enough to cover the school menu for three weeks. This year, Girard hopes to buy enough to cover eight weeks, or practically the farm's entire potato harvesting time from February to April.

At the same time, the Jones farm sold 12 million pounds of potatoes through contracts with national and international potato chip companies.

The Joneses happen to have three children attending school in the Sarasota district. Leslie Jones says she's enjoyed working with Girard and appreciates her enthusiasm. “What we're most passionate about is the awareness raised in our community about the farm,” she says.

That's fine as far as it goes.

But for Farm to School to really have an effect on the local economy by creating a market for the purchase of locally grown produce (and that is also one of the Department of Agriculture's goals), it probably has to demonstrate a greater buying power.

As Jones puts it, “If the state takes a bigger leap, and gets all the districts involved, then sure, we'd have to buy more land.”

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